Good Friday-- Christ's Glorification

Brothers and sisters in Christ—

     Human life is meant to be the loving embrace of God.  God made His image and likeness in order to love it.  We, human beings, having been reconciled to God through participation in His Christ, receive this love, and respond to it with love. 

     Christ, throughout the Gospels speaks about His glorification.  But when He says “glorification,” He does not mean His resurrection on the third day, but His redeeming suffering and death.  Every human life consists of elements of action and passion: what we do, and what we suffer.  Like Christ, our model, we must begin to recognize that our glory is in our sufferings.  Our glory consists in what we receive from God, not what we do for God, because God does not need anything from us.  A tiny child has nothing of worth to give to his father, he only sits and rests in the embrace of his father, and receives the love of his father.  Thus, it is by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God that He leads us to perfection—perfect love of Him and our neighbour. 

     Christ is our model.  Behold, He is “lifted up,” he is exalted and glorified by what He suffers.  He is exalted and glorified in the loving embrace of the Father.  We too are exalted and glorified in what we suffer, when we receive the events of our lives with equanimity, peace and joy, with the knowledge that all these things are part of His loving plan.  If we can put away the gloomy thoughts that cloud and taint our perception of the circumstances, which surround us, and live with our focus and concentration on this present moment, then the Kingdom of God will open for us, and the world, which God has created for us we take on a new and lovely freshness.  The loving embrace of God is available to us in the present moment, not in the sins and failures of our past, nor in the fears and uncertainties of the future.  Here, we rest in the loving embrace of God, as we were created to do.  In this place, in this loving embrace, in this present moment, alive with the presence of God, there is no fear, no shame, no regret, but only peace.  In this same way, John describes the death of Christ in his Gospel.  Imagine, death—in fact, a violent and painful death— accompanied only by peace, but with neither shame nor regret. John gives us an image of this peace. He begins: “In the place where they crucified Him there was a garden.” This is not the first time that God has used a garden as the symbol of His loving embrace.  In the Book of Genesis, at the very beginning of the story of God’s saving plan for us, God placed Adam in a garden that he had especially made for him.  Gardens are places of peace, not violence and fear.  The new Tree of Life is established in a garden, as a symbol of the profound and lasting peace that God means to give us in the renewed, loving embrace of His love.  John continues: “and in the garden there was a tomb in which no one had yet been buried.” Death and suffering itself is swallowed up in this peace.  Our paradise grows and blossoms from the seed of suffering.